Re: Unfortunate pixel width of one TAB

[Markus Gritsch]

Richard Stallman wrote:
>     When using a proportional font the pixel width of one TAB is "tab-width 
>     times average_char_pixel_width".  When editing files which contain tabs 
>     and spaces for indenting, this leads to some bad alignment.
>
>     If would be nice if the pixel width of one TAB could be set to something 
>     like "tab-width times space_pixel_width".
>
> Do you mean, the width of a space in the current font?
> That seems like the right behavior for it.

Yes, exactly.  The pixel width of a space of the currently used font 
should be taken into account.  As a workaround, I am currently lying to 
Emacs about the font I use.  Normally I would specify
  "-*-Bitstream Vera Sans-normal-r-*-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*"
but to get the pixel width of a tab right I have to use
  "-*-Bitstream Vera Sans-normal-r-*-*-12-*-*-*-*-40-iso8859-*".

Without explicitly specifying a pixel with of 40 for this font, Emacs 
chooses the following font which has a pixel spacing of 60 (spaces in 
the font name replaced by underscores to prevent line wrapping in the email)
-outline-Bitstream_Vera_Sans-normal-r-normal-normal-12-90-96-96-p-60-iso8859-*

This fixes the indentation problem, but since lying is never a good idea 
it leads to several problems in other cases.

Kind regards,
Markus

P.S.: I found a quite old email where the same problem was discussed for 
XEmacs: http://list-archive.xemacs.org/xemacs/199805/msg00176.html